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Comment by anonymoose234 | Hacker News Reader

>I had one opportunity to speak up when my female teammate was being discriminated against

>He's a massive jackass too, but you can't fire people on the spot for being a massive jackass without a lot of evidence to back it up.

The implication of this is that you also have experience at Uber working with somebody who is unfireable despite being a "massive jackass" and engaging in sex discrimination against at least one female employee there, while you were around as a witness. It's good that you spoke up when he acted like that, I don't mean this as a personal attack on you or your coworkers specifically. But your anecdote here reads like one more story confirming issues with Uber's management/HR, even though you've intended it otherwise.

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He clearly mentioned "It (sexism) wasn't even blatant either..".

In every company there are 'Jackasses' (selfish egotist managers, politically malevolent colleagues etc.) who can never be fired for their specific ways of 'jackassery'. In this Uber narrative it was not anyway implied that this person was always sexist jackass.

I'm just being respectful of the anonymous Uber engineers who are speaking up. This would only lead to goodness for the existing female employees who are there in Uber and other companies.

Thanks for speeaking up for me, this is exactly what I meant. It is really hard to stand up by myself against the deluge of negativity, thanks.

It is funny.

Here you are perhaps doing the same (vocalizing on behalf of silent majority of good individual engineers at Uber) and the HN crowd is piling on to you; perhaps no different behavior than what they are trying to preach against.

After reading about the egregious violations of privacy, threats against journalists, flagrant violations of the law in many countries and cities around the world and the fact that the top man of Uber was willing to serve under a Trump presidency, I don't think you can be too surprised about all the negative comments!

I feel like you didn't really read my post. You don't fire somebody the first, or even second, time they mess up. There are plenty of people at plenty of companies that /should/ be fired, but have not yet because you generally don't fire somebody without overwhelming evidence. This is not a problem exclusive to Uber.

Despite the fact I pretty clearly explained the problem, you still read into it the way you wanted the narrative to be read.

Just because you don't think someone should be fired without "overwhelming evidence" (California is at-will, of course you can fire someone for being a massive jackass that makes/made sexist comments), doesn't mean your anecdote doesn't corroborate the sentiments of this article. Despite the fact that you felt like you dealt with the situation, it still shows that this type of thing happens at Uber, even in "your corner of the company", and that it likely happens more than you know -- when you aren't around, around others who are less likely to speak up, etc.

>(California is at-will, of course you can fire someone for being a massive jackass that makes/made sexist comments)

There are more considerations like whether you're willing to pay unemployment, or open yourself up to a lawsuit depending on the circumstances.

So basically, Uber is LESS willing to risk a lawsuit for firing bad/sexist/asshat employees and MORE willing to risk a lawsuit from employees who bear the brunt of the abuse.

Oh yea thats right. As other have discussed, its because Uber is a juggernaut corp who will out-spend the legal competition anyway, so Uber doesn't care.

I appreciate your defense that "it isn't everyone" and "I am an Uber engineer and I stand up for women/gays/minorities", but I'm not sure we are getting at the larger picture here.

Its the movers and shakers at the top who need to start setting the right example instead of protecting their golf buddy who is making 6 figures. You have done your part, but this needs to go all they way up to the top.

You'd think they would at the very least care about the bad press in terms of quarterly/yearly earnings and the potential loss of customers/drivers because of the PR fallout.

If the "mess up" is deliberately discriminating against somebody over a protected class like sex, I think firing them immediately is a fair and arguably ideal action to take. I would be surprised if this wasn't the standard operating procedure in most companies.

I assumed from the phrase "massive jackass" in your post that cruel behavior from him was typical and dramatic enough to be a marked pattern. Most companies /are/ willing to fire people who repeatedly disrespect and are cruel to their coworkers. It's part of a bare baseline that you need to maintain to have a decent work environment for your employees. You and the woman he discriminated against makes at least two separate eye witness reports to an egregious offense (protected class discrimination), and I assumed from your description of him that his cruelty wasn't just exposed to you two.

You're making a lot of assumptions. You assume that the interaction where he was discriminatory took place with my teammate. That's not the case, it was a comment made to me and only me. I recorded and documented it's something that was followed up on.

I understand you're outraged at people for their discriminatory behavior but you need to recognize you don't know the facts.

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